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Life in a Corporate -1 Art of Appreciation

I am starting a series of blogs where I will share my thoughts about human behavior in the context of corporate life. The first one in the series is about ‘Art of Appreciation’.

Appreciation is one part of human psychology that brings smile to the other person. Nature has provided human beings abundance ability to appreciate. It does not require any special skill to appreciate someone and it does not cost anything. Objectively, it has following hidden benefits:

If people around you are happy, it will help you also to be happy.

It motivates people and helps improve performance which is required to be successful

If people around you are successful, then as a part of team you are bound to be successful

It brings people closer to each other, increases harmony reduces enmity

Everyone has his own way to appreciate and how s/he wants to be appreciated. There is no rule of thumb to determine what the best way to appreciate is? I am highlighting a few types of appreciations:

Public appreciation or in private

Written or verbal

Formal (email) or informal (skype, test message)

In meetings in presence of peers or one-to-one

Frequency and timing of appreciation is also important. Some people need it too often and for others, once in a while is good enough. Timing of appreciation determines the impact of appreciation. If you appreciate today’s good work tomorrow, it may dilute the impact. Various ways to appreciate are:

Words (can do wonders)

Certificate (friends and family too can cherish)

Monetary Incentives (e.g. movie tickets, gift vouchers, any other form of cash incentive)

Gifts (e.g. book, souvenir)

Bigger Responsibility

Sometime people don’t appreciate. Reasons could be:

Lack of awareness about the importance of appreciation

Peer competition prevents people appreciating others. It’s a myth that by appreciating, they are giving away advantage to peers and bringing others in limelight. In other words, people want to take all the credit themselves and hence prevent them to appreciate which is a violation of team spirit.

Appreciation must always be real based on your true judgment of good work of others. It must never be fake just to impress someone. Motive of appreciation is never to impress but an expression of your happiness straight from your heart about good work. We should be generous to appreciate colleagues, friends, and customers. Ability to appreciate is a reflection of your ability to collaborate. It has direct link if you are a team player or an individual contributor. Appreciation at the right moment in appropriate manner to the delight of the other person can spark someone’s performance to reach to new peaks. It can also help bridge the broken relationship.

Business Verticals

Stakeholder Management

@ managed mufti-cultural stakeholders from diverse background across the globe including CxO level, Highest Level of Customer Relationships, Humble Team Leadership, Worked with large Distributed Cross Functional Teams spread across continents